A customer touchpoint consists of all the times that your brand makes contact with or touches your customer. Ads, reviews, social mentions, websites, your store, your email list, and direct customer service are all examples of customer touchpoints. These are all opportunities for your customer to learn to know, like, trust, try, buy and refer you to others. You can see why it’s important to enhance your customer touchpoints when you can.
The following are all potential touchpoints for your business. Each business will have different touchpoints depending on how they work to expand their brand and get known.
* Storefront – This can be online or offline. Your customers come into contact with your brand by walking through your doors or landing on your website. If they’re walking in the door, what do they see, smell, and feel as they walk in? Is it an experience that they’re going to want to repeat? If it’s a website, does the site load fast? Does it show the information that the customer clicked through to see? Is the site easy to use? How can you reduce the steps your customer needs to take but still make it work for you on the back end?
* Billing – When you send an invoice to your customer, does it give them all the information that they need to pay your bill on time? How can you make the invoice more welcoming to the recipient? Do they get choices on how to get the invoice? Do they have choices of how to pay it? Is there some system you can use that they’ll like better?
* Phone – If you don’t normally call your customers but they’re spending a lot of money with you, maybe you should consider picking up the phone and talking to them for a few minutes in a personal way. If it is normal for them to call, what are they encountering when they call? Do they have to wait on hold, do they talk to people who understand their language, and is customer service designed to make the consumer happy or you happy? Always focus on the customer first.
* Media – How can you provide a better media experience when it comes to where your audience sees you? Do you run feel-good advertising or scary advertising? When you created that media, did you ensure that it answered questions your audience has regarding the benefits of using your brand?
* Marketing – All types of marketing, from social media ads to content marketing, can be improved to make your consumers happy instead of yourself. Always focus ever bit of your marketing materials on benefits over features, and solutions rather than problems.
* Events – If you have live events, whether in-person live events or online live events using digital video, how do your customers feel after the event? Do they feel as if they’re important to you? If not, there are ways to improve. Find ways to give your customer good memories and again, always consider how anything benefits the consumer rather than what it does for you.
* Social Media – When you use social media, are you using it as a two-way communication platform or are you simply sending out information and then ignoring questions or comments? If so, your customers aren’t getting a good feeling from you. If you really want to enhance this customer touchpoint, start answering each and every real question or comment.
* Website – When your customer comes to your website, do they find what they need to find or are they locked up trying to get things to load? Are they able to find the exact information they wanted easily or are they bombarded with a bunch of buttons and links that they didn’t want? When it comes to websites, simple is better. At least the public face of the site should be simple. No one wants to know how hard it really is.
* Sales – When you make the sale, do you follow up right away to say thank you? Do you send a follow-up a few days later as they’ve had time to implement your solution? Have you sent them a survey asking for feedback? How about a testimonial? All of these things help improve this customer touchpoint because of the interaction with you.
* Referrals – With referrals it can be more difficult to control the interaction that a customer has with your brand, because you cannot always control who is referring you. One way to make this work better is to actually have an affiliate program so that you control the message more from those who want to refer you.
The thing to remember with every single touchpoint is to put you into the mind of your audience member. What do they hope to get? What do they want? What will make them say, “Wow, this brand is amazing”? If you can get into your frame of reference that what they think and feel is more important than what you think and feel, then you’ll be able to improve every single touchpoint effortlessly.